The Orioles have a very good defense. JJ Hardy has won three straight Gold Gloves. So has Adam Jones. Manny Machado won one in his only full Major League Season. Matt Wieters has a couple on his shelf. One can argue about the efficacy of the occasional Gold Glove selection (and I have, at length), but nobody’s going to say that the O’s can’t pick it.
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Kansas City is currently lapping the field in UZR (+44), but Baltimore is solidly third in the Majors at +25. Machado (+9), Hardy (+7), and Jones (+5*) are making up the majority of that for the O’s, but they’ve also been pretty good at not having someone dragging things down – only the Orioles and the Royals don’t have a single player with worse than a -3 UZR (not counting the recently acquired Gerardo Parra).
* Second year in a row in positive territory for Jones. Fielding stats are imperfect, but if they’re close enough in this case then it’s nice to see that Adam has started to chew bubblegum and play plus defense.
According to UZR, the Orioles aren’t doing so well due to their tremendous range however (they’re just 9th in the Majors there – solid, if unspectacular). Instead the Birds just don’t make errors (41, fewest in baseball). They’ll air-mail a ball once in a while, which is why they’re middle-of-the-pack when it comes to throwing errors, but when it comes to fielding the ball cleanly the O’s are almost in another league.
Team fielding errors in 2015
Worst: A’s, Pirates – 48
Average: Braves, Card’s, Reds – 32
Second: Astros, D’Backs – 25
First: Orioles – 13
That is not even close. The O’s have fewer fielding errors than two players*. Manny Machado is the only Oriole with more than one (he has 4, but that’s OK because have you seen him play third-base?). FanGraphs has errors broken down between fielding and throwing going back to 2002, and the lowest full season total they show for a team is a tie, between the 2013 Orioles and the 2013 Rays, at 25. With 105 games already in the books for Baltimore in 2015, the team is on pace to beat that handily with just 20 fielding errors. And it’s not just a friendly scorekeeper, as it looks like the O’s have made only one more fielding error on the road than at home.
* Ian Desmond and Marcus Semien have 15. Pedro Alvarez and Elvis Andrus have 13.
That 2013 Orioles team holds the Major League record for fewest total errors in a season with 54*. The current version of the Birds would need to really ratchet down on their rate of miscues to approach that mark, as they’re on pace for 63. Still, every (unearned) run saved is one less the very average O’s offense (100 wRC+) needs to score.
* The ’13 Rays club ended up with 59 as, in a sort of mirror of the McGwire-Sosa home run record chase, both teams beat the ’03 Mariners (65).
